Technological communication risk

Last updated on February 1st, 2018 at 07:32 am

Technologists must convey what they know about long-term technology trends to enterprise strategists and others. In addition to strategists, the interested parties include internal customers of technology, product owners, product managers, project sponsors, or senior management. Within the enterprise, technologists tend to be among those most knowledgeable regarding the relative alignment between enterprise technological assets and long-term technology trends. Yet technologists frequently fail to communicate this knowledge effectively to those who need it, and that can lead to non-strategic technical debt. I call this phenomenon technological communication risk.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil — the iconic representation of communication failure. Technical debt can result from communication failures due to unwillingness to inform others of what you know, and unwillingness to receive information from others more knowledgeable.

Technological communication risk is the risk that knowledgeable people within the enterprise don’t communicate important knowledge to the people who need it, or the people who need it aren’t receptive to it. Policymakers can address this problem by working to define the roles of all involved to specify the need for this communication, and the need to be receptive to it.

A clear understanding of long-term technology trends is important in managing technical debt. Any significant misalignment between enterprise technological assets and long-term technology trends creates a risk of incurring new technical debt. As technologies evolve, enterprise assets must evolve with them. The gap between those assets and the state of the art is a source of lost productivity and depressed organizational agility, which is our definition of technical debt.

Some technologists are better informed about technology trends than are their internal customers, product owners, product managers, project sponsors, or senior management. Technologists often do attempt to communicate what they know on an informal basis, but unless such communication is expected and defined as an official duty, their superiors and internal customers don’t always welcome the information, especially if they haven’t heard it elsewhere, or if it conflicts with what they’ve learned elsewhere, or if its implications conflict with established strategic positions.

Many technologists are aware that their superiors might not welcome their observations about technological trends or technology-based strategic vulnerabilities or opportunities. For example, one might understand why a technologist might be reluctant to alert an unreceptive senior manager to a suddenly revealed cybersecurity risk that would be very expensive to mitigate. This mechanism is especially strong when deploying adequate cyberdefense would compete for resources with other initiatives already underway, or when the negative consequences of the vulnerability are unlikely to materialize. And some tend to question technologists’ credibility when they blame the technologists for the vulnerability itself.

Situations like these can lead to the formation of new non-strategic technical debt in circumstances such as the following:

Management directs the technologists to produce capabilities using approaches known to the technologists to be technological dead ends.

Management directs the technologists to implement capabilities that don’t exploit known approaches that could open new and vital lines of business.

Management directs the technologists to focus resources on initiatives that in the view of the technologists lack sufficient technological imperative.

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Reference posts

A collection of definitions of terms as we use them in this blog, with links to longer discussions of each term. Along with each definition is a link to a post that discusses that term in more detail. Read more…

Welcome to Technical Debt for Policymakers. What you’ll find here are resources, insights, and conversations of interest to policymakers who are concerned with managing technical debt within their organizations. Read more…

When retiring one kind of technical debt from an asset, auxiliary technical debt is any other kind of technical debt in the asset. It can be tempting to try to retire auxiliary technical debt too. Sometimes that’s wise, but it can lead to scope creep. Rules of engagement can control this temptation. [More]

To retire technical debt, we need to know where it is. And if service disruptions are necessary, we need to know who will be affected. Here’s a survey of some of the issues, and suggestions for resolving them. [More]

For some assets, we can’t allow debt to persist, and we can’t afford replacements. We must retire the debt. This post begins exploring what it takes to design projects to retire technical debt in irreplaceable assets. [More]

By carefully observing what happens when we actually try to retire some kinds of technical debt, we can better understand the degree of the degree of wickedness of the effort. That understanding helps manage risk in technical debt retirement projects, reducing costs and speeding execution. [More]